As writers and managers, we often hear what should be done, but how to do it and do it correctly, can be tough. This one–day workshop has four excellent topics teaching you how to improve your team, how to identify the right translation vendor to work with, how to promote yourself and your team internally, and how to manage during transitions of key staff. Leave with clear action items to get results from your team, and get work done on time and within budget.

The day includes a hot, catered lunch, morning and afternoon snacks, and speaker handouts
With the tough economic times we are facing it is more important than ever to ensure you have the right team, the right partners, the right image, and the right management.

Promotion from Within: During tough times it can be difficult to find the resources to hire new members for your team. One solution is to promote from within. However, finding the right team members, and identifying the key habits that make a technical communicator great, can make all the difference in team building. Visnja discusses these traits and teaches you how to identify them and promote the right people from within your current ranks.

Visnja Beg is the Project Manager overseeing all deliverables for the IBM Rational Software family of User Assistance products. She has worked in technical communications for 20 years and is a past president of STC Ottawa and has presented at several STC conferences.

10:15

Coffee, tea, snacks, & social networking

10:30

Choosing the Right Translation Vendor: When content must be translated, it is crucial to choose the right vendor. To find the right vendor, you need to ask the right questions. You also need to evaluate bids beyond the cost per word. What are best practices for making this important decision? Learn how to select a vendor based on lessons learned by those who have gone through the process. Save yourself both money and time.

Vivian Aschwanden has over 11 years of experience in information development in both writing and leadership roles. She has been a lone writer for a startup, led a doc team in a broadcast engineering firm, and now fills a part-time project management role at Platform Computing in conjunction with her full-time writing.

12:00

Networking lunch

13:00

Internal Consulting: Selling Tech Comm Inside Your Organization: Learn how to expand your network inside your organization, increase the services you offer, and boost the value of you and your team in the eyes of your employer. Told as a true story about the growth of a tech writing team, this session teaches techniques and tools for developing relationships in your company and turning those relationships into lines of business.

Mark Pepper is a communicator with 14 years of experience. He has been the lead technical writing consultant at Deloitte & Touche, an elearning writer and project manager, worked in journalism, business analysis, and at the help desk. He presently runs his own company, Crimson Sage Softworks Inc.

14:30

Coffee, tea, snacks, & social networking

14:45

Managing Management Change: how do you manage the abrupt departure of management? Learn how an interim manager steered a department through change and brought in a new ID manager (promoted from within the team) with minimal damage to productivity or morale. Effective change management strategies eased the transition. Learn key things you need to do to ensure change “sticks”, and strategies to help a team grow through the change.

Jim Smith is Manager of Information Development and User Experience at Platform Computing. Jim has been an information developer for over 20 years, including 7 years at IBM’s Toronto Lab. He has enjoyed 10 years at Platform, where he now manages a dynamic team of information developers and usability experts.

I seldom receive any e-mail from this discussion list so I am assuming we are all an extraordinarily industrious bunch! One Canadian concern I would like to bring up related to the STC is the fact that the STC no longer does salary surveys that apply to Canada. From now on they will use US government data since they judge this more accurate than surveying their membership. I would like to know where that leaves their Canadian members. We have little information other than that which we gather ourselves through the grapevine by talking to colleagues or recruiters. Am I right in assuming there is now no Canadian salary data that will be distributed through the STC? Am I missing something?

Best indeed to all of you,

Peter Kelly

Yes, Peter is correct, that (at least for now) there is no Canadian salary data that is being distributed through the STC. You can read the article in the Intercom to see why the STC switched to using the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics.

Although this is currently a loss for those of us in Canada, think of it as an opportunity to define what sort of salary survey we would like, and to make it happen. If you would like to be on the STC Canadian Salary Survey Committee, please let me know. Feel free to discuss on the list what sort of salary information would be most useful to you.

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Your first thought is a first draft. That’s especially true with Web pages, where whoever suggests the first information structure was likely influenced by the paper version. On reflection, you can start using the power of links. Here’s an example:

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On Planet PDF, Shlomo Perets is publishing a series of articles about PDF Best Practices. He reminds us that PDF doesn’t always mean Acrobat PDF.

Here’s the first one:

Save vs. Save As

Acrobat’s ‘Save’ function is a “fast save” which does not remove deleted objects from the file being saved (so that deleting 50 pages out of 100 and saving will actually result in a slightly larger file compared to the original). Only ‘Save As’ rewrites the entire file so that items no longer used are not stored in the file.

During the rewriting, Acrobat can also optimize the file, storing identical items only once and reference them in different pages. Thus, when finalizing a PDF it is beneficial to do a ‘Save As’ to get rid of extra baggage or deleted items, even if no change was actually done in that last session.

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The Out Campaign

“Atheism is a religion like 'not collecting stamps' is a hobby.”
―Penn Jillette“If atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair color” ―Mark Schnitzius"If atheism is a religion, then health is a disease!" —Clark Adams